YouTube Reaches 4 Billion Views Per Day

Google’s video-sharing property YouTube now sees 4 billion video views per day. That’s a 25% increase over the past eight months, the company told Reuters in a report released this morning. There’s now approximately 60 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute, compared with roughly 48 hours uploaded in May.

The last time YouTube released this data was in May 2011, when the company was celebrating its sixth birthday. At the time, YouTube was seeing 3 billion views per day, an increase of 50% over the past 12 months. That’s the equivalent of every U.S. resident watching at least nine videos per day, the company explained at the time to give the figure some impact.

Previously, YouTube hit the 2 billion views per day mark in May 2010, which the company noted was “nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined.” And the site had passed 1 billion views a day in October 2009. However, as Jason Kincaid noted then, that number was likely a bit lower than the actual figure. It had previously been reported that the site had reached 1.2 billion views a day the previous June.

So it could be that YouTube reached this latest milestone of 4 billion views per day several weeks (or even months) earlier, but has just now chosen to share the information publicly.

Reuters notes that most of the 4 billion videos viewed on YouTube today don’t make money. Only 3 billion YouTube videos a week are being monetized, the company says. YouTube is also now focusing on content deals with media partners as of late. It just added Reuters TV (which is likely how they got to this data first) as one of what’s now 100 original programming deals.

Update: Google confirmed the statistics which it gave to (new media partner) Reuters this morning, via a company blog post. As always, YouTube is having fun with the numbers, noting “you’re uploading one hour of video every second!” (Whoa).

YouTube also launched a fun site called onehourpersecond.com, which shows an interactive collection of what happens in a YouTube second. A sample is below: